The World Food Prize 2011 winners

The World Food Prize Symposium takes place this week in Des Monies, Iowa. The annual event brings in policy makers and scientists from around the globe to discuss ways to improve the production of food to ensure that no one goes hungry. During the event the World Food Prize is also awarded to recognize people who have made outstanding contributions to improving food security.

From the Wallaces Farmer, we find out more about this year's prize winners.

The World Food Prize, awarded each year since 1994 and sponsored by the late Des Moines businessman and philanthropist John Ruan, recognizes the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity, or availability of food in the world, thereby helping to boost global food security. This year, the prize will be awarded to John Agyekum Kufuor, the former president of Ghana, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former president of Brazil, for their outstanding achievements in reducing hunger in their countries. The ceremony will take place during the Borlaug International Symposium, which is the official name. World Food Prize officials commonly refer to the symposium as the "Borlaug Dialogue."
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Both of this year's World Food Prize recipients have made considerable contributions to their countries' ag sectors. Under former Ghanaian President Kufuor's tenure, both the share of people suffering from hunger and the share of people living on less than $1 dollar a day were halved. Economic reforms strengthened public investment in food and agriculture, which was a major factor behind the quadrupling of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) between 2003 and 2008. Because 60% of Ghana's population depends directly on agriculture, the sector is critical for the country's economic development.

In addition to the economic reforms, Ghana's Agricultural Extension Service helped alleviate hunger and poverty by educating farmers and ultimately doubling cocoa production between 2002 and 2005. And the country's School Feeding Program, which began in 2005, ensures that school children receive one nutritiously and locally produced meal every day. The program has transformed domestic agriculture by supporting irrigation, improving seeds and crop diversification, making tractors more affordable for farmers, and building feed roads, silos, and cold stores for horticultural crops.

In Brazil, among the major goals of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's presidency were alleviating poverty, improving educational opportunities for children, providing greater inclusion of the poor in society, and ensuring that "every Brazilian has food to eat three times a day." The government implemented policies and actions known as the "Zero Hunger Programs" to provide cash aid to poor families (guaranteeing a minimum income and enabling access to basic goods and services); to distribute food to poor families through community restaurants, assisted-living facilities, day-care centers, and related organizations; and to provide nutritious meals to children in public schools. As a result, the number of hungry people in Brazil was halved, and the share of Brazilians living in extreme poverty decreased from 12% in 2003 to 4.8% in 2009.

Audio: Interview with World Food Prize winner David Beckmann

From NPR, an interview with David Beckmann co-winner of the World Food Prize and founder of Bread For the World.

Howard Buffett calls for a "brown revolution"

As was pointed out in our previous post, increased food production can help to lower the cost of food. If the small farmers of the world could greatly increase their yields, not only would they have more food for themselves, any extra they sell in market would be more affordable for their hungry neighbors.

How best to increase yields is being discussed at the World Food Prize symposium. Howard Buffet used his speech to state the need for improved soil nutrients in Africa. Howard, the son of the investor Warren Buffet, leads his own foundation concerned with farming.

The article on Buffett from Bloomberg mainly focuses on his future at his father's business Berkshire Hathaway. For our snippet, writer Alan Bjerga and Andrew Frye touches on his speech at the World Food Prize forum.

A “Brown Revolution” to improve soil quality is more important to African agriculture than new seeds and fertilizers, said Howard Buffett, who may succeed his father, Warren Buffett, as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Africans who farm plots of less than 3 acres (1.2 hectares) will need tailored solutions that may be different from the “Green Revolution” that boosted crop yields in Asia, Howard Buffett, 55, said today in a speech at the World Food Prize conference in Des Moines, Iowa.

“Food security is complicated, agriculture is complicated,” said Buffett, who illustrated his speech with anecdotes and photographs from interviews with African farmers. “Simply distributing seeds and fertilizer, if that’s the plan, will fail long term.”

Buffett, a Berkshire director since 1993, is an ambassador against hunger for the United Nations’ World Food Program and runs the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, which aids subsistence farming. Today, the foundation announced $13 million in grants over four years to small farmers in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua.
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Fluctuations in the cost of staples are “a pretty scary thing” to poorer populations that spend almost all of their income on food, Buffett said in an interview after his speech. A stronger agriculture infrastructure will protect against higher prices, he said.

“You have to start with the basics,” including agricultural education, literacy and investment in roads and storage necessary to bring farm goods to market, he said. Then, farmers will be integrated into the global market as poor countries become more self-sufficient and are able to export cash crops, he said.

2010 World Food Prize winners on aiding small farmers

The World Food Prize was awarded today to Heifer International president Jo Luck and Bread for the World president David Beckmann. The prize usually goes to scientists who invent ways to increase food production in the under-developed world. This year, the granters of the prize decided to recognize the contributions of the non-profit community.

One of the major criticisms of the non-profits is that they just give food away, but that is not so of Heifer and Bread for the World. Instead, both organizations give resources and materials that the poor can use to produce more food so they can gain more money from it.

From the Des Moines Register, newspaper for the host city of the World Food Prize, writer Philip Brasher interviews both Luck and Beckmann.

Q: Brazil dramatically increased its agricultural output through large-scale farms, and the Economist magazine recently said that model could likely be repeated in Africa. Why focus on small-scale farmers?

Beckmann: In Africa, poor people are on the small farms and it is feasible to improve their productivity. If you do that, you get more food into the local markets, so that brings down the price of food. Heifer has long demonstrated that you can increase the productivity of these small farmers.

There are situations where large-scale agriculture could do some good. I'm not ideological about this. But most of the poor people in the world are smallholder farmers, so the most direct route to reducing poverty is in increasing their productivity.

Q: So aid to farmers is important not only to increase food production but lift people out of poverty?

Luck: Absolutely. You just give them the animals. They have better nutrition for their children. They use the manure to plant their crops. They're usually relegated to the worst land in the world, slash-and-burn hillsides. I've gone in where the entire place looked like it was painted with tan paint. There was nothing colorful about any of it. I went back just two years later in Honduras and they had terraced those slash-and-burn hillsides. They had planted nitrogen-fixing trees. They had crops going. They had ribbons around the necks of the goats. They had built pens for them to keep them healthy and safe. Children were exercising them. Big companies can't do that.

Q: But doesn't humanitarian aid often foster dependency?

Luck: It does, if they don't help people become self-reliant. Don't just hand it out and deliver it and leave. That is not sustainable. That's why I believe so much in the work we do and others with this kind of approach working beyond the disaster assistance or emergency assistance. Give them a few resources, give them a few animals and some training and you can't hold them back. They may not all be a millionaire, but they're going to be successful. They're going to be proud and making decisions and they're going to be influencing the government.

Beckmann: The U.S. government's world hunger initiative is focused on countries that have good policies in place and are investing their own money in agriculture.

Luck: So it's more sustainable.

Beckmann: Where you have dubious results is where local people aren't doing what they should be doing. In poor countries that have their act together and are using their own money, well, there are lots of opportunities.

World Food Prize symposium begins

The World Food Prize symposium begins today in Des Monies. Experts and advocates on agriculture from around the world will meet in Iowa to talk about solutions for the small farmer.

The event will also award this year's World Food Prize. The Prize is given to people who help to increase food production in developing countries. This year, the prize will be given to Heifer International president Jo Luck and Bread for the World president David Beckmann.

From this Associated Press article that we found at Google news, writer Micheal Crumb presents what will happen at the symposium.

Their problems will be the focus of this week's World Food Prize symposium, as agriculture officials from around the world gather to talk about what can be done to fight hunger. As many as 60 farmers are expected to join agriculture officials from the U.S., Afghanistan, Pakistan and Liberia, said Kenneth Quinn, president of the World Food Prize Foundation, which hosts the annual conference in Des Moines.

Former U.S. Secretary General Kofi Annan is scheduled to give the keynote address Thursday, when the foundation will give its World Food Prize to the presidents of Heifer International and the Christian advocacy group Bread for the World in recognition of their efforts to fight hunger. Heifer International provides families with food- and income-producing animals, such as sheep, while Bread for the World presses U.S. lawmakers to support anti-hunger policies.

The goal for the conference is to find ways to provide smallholder farmers with technology "so they can get the most out of their land, not to just feed themselves but to become produces who are growing food for others in their country and their society," Quinn said.

"It's become clear that smallholder farmers play a critical role in the global food supply," he added.

But Howard Buffett, whose foundation runs research farms in Illinois and South Africa, said technology isn't always the answer. Western-style farming, which relies heavily on expensive fertilizers and equipment, may not work in poor countries, he said.

"People want to provide a silver bullet solution and there aren't any," said Buffett, who is scheduled to speak Wednesday. "It's not easy to do and you can't take technology, better seed and fertilizer and think that's going to solve the problem."

He said smallholder farmers need what he called "basic types of intervention," such as cover crops, conservation-based tillage systems and very basic farm equipment. They also need help improving soil fertility to stop "slash-and-burn" farming.

"They will farm a few acres for a few years and then get no more production because there is no soil fertility left and they will chop down and clear three to four more acres to farm on," he said. "We need to do this in ways that will improve food security and agriculture and be good for the environment."

2010 winners of World Food Prize come from NGOs

The winners of this year's World Food Prize were announced yesterday in Washington. The winners are two people who work in non-governmental organizations. One winner knew the founder of the Prize the late great Dr Norman Bourlag, and established Bread for the World. The other winner helped to build the organization Heifer International.

From the Des Moines Register, writer Philip Brasher tells us more about the winners.

David Beckmann, an ordained Lutheran minister as well as a trained economist, left a job at the World Bank to take the helm of Bread for the World 19 years ago. He has led the group in a series of campaigns to change U.S. policy on issues from debt relief for developing countries, overseas agricultural aid and reforming farm subsidies.

Jo Luck served in Bill Clinton's cabinet when he was governor of Arkansas. She later expanded Little Rock, Ark.-based Heifer's donor base from 20,000 people in 1992 to more than 500,000 by 2009.

She built the group, which teaches poor people self-reliance through livestock husbandry, into one of the "premier hunger-fighting nonprofit organizations anywhere in the world," according to the Des Moines-based World Food Prize Foundation, which selects the laureates.

The World Food Prize carries a $250,000 award and is given each year to recognize advancements in increasing or improving global food supplies and expanding access to food.

The laureate is often a scientist, like the award's late founder, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug. Two years ago, the award was split by two former senators, George McGovern and Robert Dole, who got Congress to create a program for providing school meals to children in the poorest countries.

Africa only needs to improve soil to feed itself

A former winner of the World Food Prize says that Africa can feed itself, if more money was spent on returning nutrients to the soil. Dr Pedro Sanchez won the World Food Prize for his work in improving the soils in Asia and Latin America. Dr. Sanchez says improving Africa's soil could triple food yields which would make the continent no longer dependent of food aid.

From ABC News, writer Anna Salleh attended a speech by Dr Sanchez in Sydney.

"A lot of the public opinion still feels that Africa is a basket case. It cannot feed itself," says Dr Sanchez, of Columbia University's The Earth Institute in New York.

"I think that needs to change."

Expanding on a recent article in Nature Geoscience, Dr Sanchez argues tropical Africa is capable of tripling its crop yields if something is done about the lack of nutrients in its soils.

"Food crop yields have not changed in Africa since 1961," he says. "That's 50 years. It's amazing."

Dr Sanchez says most of the soils cultivated by Africa's small farmers are "pretty decent", but have become depleted of nitrogen, and to a lesser extent phosphorous.

"The soils are not inherently bad as some people have said," he says.

"What happened is that farmers took out too many nutrients, mainly in the form of crop harvests."

He says the same thing happened after 100 years of farming in the US Midwest, which has some of the best soils in the world.

While he sees GM crops as part of the solution to feeding Africa, Sanchez says the focus of donor agencies, like the World Bank, on improved crop varieties has missed the importance of soils.

"If the fertilisers aren't there, there is no way you can have high-yielding varieties reaching their potential," says Dr Sanchez.

The winner of the 2009 World Food Prize: Gabisa Ejeta

One of the problems of only doing this blog in our spare time is that we miss a lot of important stories. We realized this morning that we forgot to make mention of the 2009 winner of the World Food Prize awarded last week. The World Food Prize is similar to the Nobel Peace Prize, but this prize is given to scientists who make new innovations to help feed the world.

This years winner is Gebisa Ejeta, a professor of agronomy at Purdue University. Ejeta hails from Ethiopia and remembers from his time there the use of the grain sorghum as a staple of the East African diet. His innovations have multiplied sorghum yields many, many times over.

From USA Today, writer Elizabeth Weise details Ejeta's work.

"A lot of people who grew up it the Midwest in the '40s and '50s would remember the old syrup for pancakes, made of milo," as sorghum is sometimes called there, he says.

It's also used to make gluten-free beers for people with celiac disease. But in Africa and Asia, it's a major grain, used in porridge and bread, in making beer and popping like popcorn.

Sorghum feeds 500 million to 700 million people worldwide, Ejeta says. "It's a huge crop in Africa; it's a very important crop in India. In China it's used for making their national alcoholic beverage," baijiu, or white liquor.
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Ejeta, born in a one-room thatched hut in west-central Ethiopia, walked 12 miles to attend a nearby school, returning home only on the weekends. After graduating from Alemaya College in eastern Ethiopia, he received a Ph.D. in plant breeding and genetics from Purdue in 1978.

His then began to work on new sorghum varieties as a researcher at the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Sudan. Ejeta's hybrid, released in 1983, had yields 150% greater than local sorghum. By 1999, 1 million acres were being harvested by Sudanese farmers, feeding millions in that country. Ejeta also developed a drought-tolerant sorghum hybrid that fit conditions in Niger, which yielded four to five times the national sorghum average for that country.

Next, Ejeta turned his focus to a hugely harmful weed called striga, commonly known as witchweed. This parasite lives off corn, rice, millet, sugar cane and sorghum in much the way that mistletoe lives off trees. The United Nations estimates that it infests up to 40% of the arable savannah land in Africa.

"There was a small area in North and South Carolina that had striga in the 1950s," Ejeta says. "It took the USDA nearly 30 years to eradicate it."

Working with colleagues at Purdue, Ejeta bred a sorghum variety that is resistant to witchweed. Various aid groups have distributed the seed in numerous African countries. Yields have increased as much as four times over local varieties, even in times of severe drought.

Two former US Senators receive World Food Award

Senators Bob Dole and George McGovern each worked in the Senate, each ran unsuccessful campaigns for President, and each launched a program that helps to feed thousands of poor children around the world.

The two former senators were recognized with the World Food Prize today for their launch of the George McGovern-Robert Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program.

The Delta Farm Press gives us a history of the program.

In the late 1990s, McGovern and Dole worked with President Bill Clinton to establish a pilot program to provide poor children throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe with school meals.

A two-year pilot program, the Global Food for Education Initiative, was established in 2000. Based on the success of the pilot, in 2002 Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law the George McGovern-Robert Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program (known as the McGovern-Dole Program).

The McGovern-Dole Program has spurred increased commitments from donor countries for school feeding and has renewed support from development leaders. The G8 and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) have listed school feeding as a specific intervention in their action plans for poverty alleviation, and the UN Millennium Project included school feeding as one of its 10 key recommendations for achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

Because hungry children have difficulty learning, the McGovern-Dole Program has had a remarkable educational impact, said Quinn. In addition to increasing school enrollment, school-feeding programs have been shown to improve cognition and overall academic performance and overcome gender inequalities in literacy and access to education. While young girls in developing countries are often kept out of school to work in the home, they are much more likely to be allowed — even encouraged — to enroll in schools with feeding programs.

The success of the program has led to dramatically increased international support for the expansion of school-feeding operations in developing countries around the world. As one example, the UN World Food Program’s school-feeding operations have nearly doubled since 2001; in 2006 alone, it fed more than 20 million children in 74 countries.

“Senators McGovern and Dole are tireless champions in the battle against hunger, and are an enormous inspiration,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program. “They have given millions of children a chance to dream — and to live healthy lives — through school feeding.”

Since 1986, when the World Food Prize was conceived by Borlaug, it has honored outstanding individuals who have made vital contributions to improving the quality, quantity or availability of food throughout the world. Previous laureates have been recognized from Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Denmark, India, Mexico, Sierra Leone, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Nations and the United States.